Young Eliot

by Robert Crawford

  Culpin was still a controversial figure when, probably encouraged by Blanshard (elected secretary of Merton’s Debating Society for 1914–15), Tom got to know him. In early November 1914 the club’s President ruled against a proposal that voting procedures should ‘conform entirely to American models’. Culpin tried to censure this decision. Later, when Tom’s neighbour, John Bulmer, moved ‘that in view of the state of international relations revealed by the war, it is desirable to introduce conscription into the British Empire’, Culpin opposed this, bolstering his case with convincing statistics. The vote was lost by 13 to 6. Tom liked Culpin whom he regarded as ‘the most intelligent of the Englishmen at Merton’, and he got on with Blanshard well enough: ‘an excellent butt for discourse’, exhibiting ‘all the great American fallacies’, including vagueness and diffuseness.53 On 23 November the motion was debated ‘that this Society abhors the threatened Americanization of Oxford’. Bulmer spoke against it. So did Tom, who, the minutes record, ‘preserved the appearance of gravity, which was more than the house did’. Sure he had not been so grave, Tom was pleased to have worked in references to a brand-new ragtime dance-craze: the fox trot. ‘I pointed out to them frankly how much they owed to Amurrican culcher in the drayma (including the movies) in music, in the cocktail, and in the dance’, he informed Eleanor Hinkley.54 The meeting’s twenty-two voters included several Americans, Indians and a Frenchman as well as students from England. Debate was lively: a visiting speaker from Magdalen College ‘showed the House how dreadful the American accent was by mimicking it’. Another, unEnglish speaker attempted to assume the most Oxonian English voice. The motion was lost, narrowly, by 12 votes to 10.55 Tom was on the winning side.

  As in Paris, so in Oxford, he made a small number of close friends. He spent part of the Christmas vacation in London, surrounded by more Americans, in lodgings at 1 Gordon Street off Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Nearby, at a table under the great dome of the circular reading room in the British Museum, he perused another commentary on Aristotle. On one occasion, probably through Pound, he found himself invited to a ‘cubist tea’, meeting ‘two cubist painters, a futurist novelist, a vorticist poet and his wife, a cubist lady black-and-white artist, another cubist lady, and a retired army officer who has been living in the east end and studying Japanese’.56 A long time afterwards, Tom remembered attending an artists’ soirée during this period. He recalled ‘Bomberg, Etchells, Roberts, Wadsworth, Miss Sanders and Miss Dismorr as being present’.57 In London he chatted, too, with Charles Abraham Ellwood, a University of Missouri professor, staying at 1 Gordon Square surrounded by his family. Interested in eugenics and social psychology, Ellwood was spending session 1914–15 in Oxford, consulting works on sociology and anthropology in the Bodleian Library. He told Tom that Lottie Eliot was one of his ‘three dearest friends in St Louis’.58 Far from his own family, Tom found the Christmas period very quiet. A card came from Adeleine Moffatt in Boston, whom he had portrayed in ‘Portrait of a Lady’; she sent him ‘ringing greetings of friend to friend at this season of high festival’.59 Norbert Wiener, then spending time at the University of Cambridge, working with Bertrand Russell, recalled meeting Tom for ‘a not too hilarious Christmas dinner together in one of the larger Lyons restaurants’.60 As gifts and loans Wiener brought a handful of his own recent philosophical publications on such topics as relativism and logic. Christmas turkey was inappropriate. Jewish Wiener, Tom noted, was ‘vegetarian, and the lightest eater I have ever seen’.61

  Usually in London Tom felt a certain big-city excitement, confessing (or perhaps boasting) to Aiken, ‘Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.’62 Like many people, he altered his tone to take account of his correspondent: as far as his Harvard professors were concerned, Oxford was splendid. To Aiken he explained that London made him feel very alive, but also lonely, not least on New Year’s Eve. He wandered the city streets, and had ‘tea when there is anyone to have it with’.63 Though in correspondence with his cousin Eleanor he did his best to sound buoyant and busy, to Aiken he confided that his sense of isolation had a sexual dimension. Joking that he longed for ‘concubinage and conversation’, he wrote from London with perceptive introspection about problems in his sex life.

  How much more self-conscious one is in a big city. Have you noticed it? Just at present this is an inconvenience, for I have been going through one of those nervous sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in a city. Why I had almost none last fall I don’t know – this is the worst since Paris. I never have them in the country … I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society); and feel the deprivation at Oxford – one reason why I should not care to remain longer – but there, with the exercise and routine, the deprivation takes the form of numbness only; while in the city it is more lively and acute. One walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. I should be better off, I sometimes think, if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago: and indeed I still think sometimes that it would be well to do so before marriage.64

  Marriage, though, did not seem on the cards. Aiken was privy to at least some secrets of Tom’s love life, or lack of it. From Oxford Tom had written asking if in early December Aiken would buy ‘some red or pink roses, Killarney I suppose’, and send them with a card to Emily Hale at Brattle Hall.65 She was going to be acting there in the Cambridge Dramatic Club’s production of a three-act comedy about social climbing, Mrs Bumstead-Leigh. Tom was eager that Aiken in America make sure the roses reached Emily, if not at the play then later at Christmas, but there is something tentative and sad in his specifying not that they should be red but that they should be ‘red or pink’. As well as Emily, Amy de Gozzaldi came into his mind over the vacation. Both were out of reach.

  With Culpin and Blanshard he had been on a mid-December holiday to Swanage in Dorset. This south-coast seaside town was the sort he liked – an English version of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Staying over a fortnight with a local landlady, each student had his own bedroom, reading there mornings and evenings. They ate together in the dining room, and enjoyed long afternoon walks by the sea or over the soft-turfed, treeless downs. Visiting tourist sites including Corfe Castle and the Tilly Whim caves, they had enjoyed themselves. Culpin and Blanshard sensed Tom’s reserve, but were conscious he liked them. They were appropriately impressed when he propped Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica open in front of him at the breakfast table, eyeing its symbols with savoir faire. ‘He said that manipulating them gave him a curious sense of power.’ Blanshard thought he was friendly, ‘but preferred to wear that Mona Lisa smile and listen with laconic remarks rather than to initiate or develop subjects himself’.66

  In this small seaside town, the holidaying students had checked out the local female talent. ‘We had met a pretty, apple-cheeked English girl from Bournemouth whom we all liked, and we thought it would make for merriment to shivaree her. We divided the forms of celebration between us, and one of them was to indite a poem in her honour.’67 Blanshard made the poem. Tom had not even revealed that he wrote verse. To his friends he was simply available company, a young and dauntingly clever visiting American.

  Back in Oxford the philosopher who interested him most at Merton was one of the college fellows, the idealist thinker F. H. Bradley, author of Appearance and Reality (1893). Eventually Tom came to think Bradley’s ‘the finest philosophic style in our language’; it possessed a ‘reserved power’.68 Then approaching seventy, and having long enjoyed a fellowship without teaching duties, the long-faced, bearded Bradley was notoriously reclusive, his manner reminiscent of Merton’s ‘mediaeval schoolmen’.69 Still active, in 1914 he had just published Essays on Truth and Reality, critiquing the work of William James and Bertrand Russell while developing his own thinking on epistemology, God and the Absolute. Bradley’s colleagues, including Tom’s college tutor Harold Joachim, protected the elderly don from students. To
m’s shyness meant that, though the enterprising Blanshard dared submit a note with questions for the Great Man, who subsequently invited him for conversation, to Tom’s disappointment he and Bradley never once met. Instead Tom went, sometimes accompanying Blanshard, for regular Oxford-style tutorials with the Hungarian immigrant’s son Harold Joachim. Joachim’s formidable 1908 study, The Nature of Truth (a copy of which Tom had brought from Harvard), censures Bertrand Russell, presenting an idealist theory of truth accompanied by detailed readings of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza and the elusive Bradley. At these meetings Tom or his fellow tutee would read a paper aloud, after which the erudite, pipe-smoking Joachim, then in his mid-forties, would do his best, intellectually speaking, to shred it.

  This shredding could be gruelling, but Tom learned from it. He had been used to producing Harvard student papers prinked with literary allusions or metaphorical flourishes. Joachim disliked these. ‘He taught me’, Tom recalled, ‘in the course of criticizing weekly essays with a sarcasm the more authoritative because of its gentle impersonality.’ The Oxford philosopher wanted clarity, not quasi-literary distractions. Between October 1914 and July 1915 Tom worked hard for these tutorials. As well as meeting Joachim to read Aristotle, once a week he presented ‘a short paper dealing with some one of the questions considered in the thesis which I hope to present for the degree of Ph.D. at Harvard.’70 Discussing these papers with Joachim ‘in detail’, he wrote on such subjects as ‘real, unreal, ideal, and imaginary objects’. Thinking strenuously, he found himself taking a stance on what is ‘wholly real’, only to realise that he must also argue against it: ‘But there is another point of view, obtained by standing this one upon its head, which I find equally necessary to insist upon. From this point of view it may be suggested that the absolute is the one thing in the world which is real. Reality is the one thing which doesn’t exist.’71

  Working intensively, even risking the occasional disturbingly vivid phrase as he contemplated ‘the suicide of knowledge’, Tom in these tutorials came to realise that Joachim ‘was concerned with clearing up confusion rather than with scoring off his victim’. The Merton philosophy don wanted to instil the ideal ‘that one should know what one meant before venturing to put word to paper’.72 Reading Aristotle in Greek with Joachim, whose lectures on the Nicomachean Ethics he attended thrice weekly from 13 October 1914 throughout the session, was demanding. Tom had written to J. H. Woods at Harvard on 5 October to say he had been reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the original Greek, and was expecting to go through the Posterior Analytics in Joachim’s tutorials.73 From the college library he borrowed Giacomo Zabarella’s weighty Renaissance Latin commentary on the Posterior Analytics in October and kept renewing it until the following June: he considered Zabarella ‘probably the greatest of all Aristotelian commentators’. Later, in January 1915, he consulted Pacius’s sixteenth-century Latin commentary on Aristotle’s Organon.74 Supplementing Joachim’s lectures, he attended R. G. Collingwood’s on Aristotle’s De Anima, consulting Pacius’s commentary on that too: almost forty years later he still recalled how Joachim ‘made me read’ Pacius.75 Tom’s third lecture course during his first term was on Logic with Professor J. A. Smith, who was then in the first decade of his more than thirty-year-long editing of Aristotle. Conscious that as part of his doctoral ordeals at Harvard he could face an examination on Ancient Philosophy, Tom annotated thoroughly his Greek copy of the Metaphysica. Aristotle entered his bloodstream.

  In Collingwood’s lectures, he took detailed notes, sometimes drawing on his Harvard reading to annotate them. So, for instance, on 29 October as he recorded one of Collingwood’s points about the De Anima – that ‘If the soul moves in space, it might move out of the body and back again’ – Tom scribbled the words ‘Golden Bough’, remembering the anthropologist Frazer’s accounts of souls being said to leave bodies.76 Soon he acquired ‘the highest respect for English methods of teaching’.77 ‘For anyone who is going to teach the Oxford discipline is admirable’, he wrote to Professor Woods at Harvard, taking care to impress him by offering to type up and send his lecture notes.78 Tom gave Woods the clear impression in November 1914 that university teaching was his goal. Yet working with Joachim also sharpened his literary education in ways that matter to poets: ‘To his explication de texte of the Posterior Analytics I owe an appreciation of the importance of punctuation.’ Tom remained proud of his sometimes rhetorical sense of punctuation, especially in verse; paying tribute to Joachim (a highly gifted musician) he maintained that ‘Any virtues my prose writing may exhibit are due to his correction.’ He thought Joachim ‘perhaps the best lecturer’ at Oxford, ‘really almost a genius, with respect to Aristotle’.79 Tom credited no other academic in England or America with such a detailed influence on the style and structure of his writing.80

  Just three years after teaching him, Joachim wrote of Tom as ‘a man of very exceptional ability’, stating, ‘it was a great pleasure to work with him’. He praised Tom’s ‘thorough knowledge of ancient Greek’ as ‘scholarly & profound’; his American ‘pupil’ was ‘excellent in every respect’.81 During his strenuous philosophical training Tom argued for ‘a more minute examination of the question of truth’.82 Joachim expounded a ‘coherence theory of truth’. Truth was made up of ‘significant wholes’.

  A ‘significant whole’ is such that all its constituent elements reciprocally involve one another or reciprocally determine one another’s being as contributing features in a single concrete meaning. The elements thus cohering constitute a whole which may be said to control the reciprocal adjustment of its elements, as an end controls its constituent means. And in this sense a Centaur is inconceivable …83

  The philosophically-minded poet and theorist Tom, fresh from Royce’s theories of how communities construct interpretations, would recast ideas like Joachim’s in his thinking about tradition and the individual talent. As a poet he would draw on them too, sometimes subversively. Whereas the Merton tutor declared centaurs ‘inconceivable’, his ‘pupil’ wrote in verse around this time about the wonderfully disruptive presence of that foreigner Bertrand Russell at Fuller’s Harvard tea-party: ‘I heard the beat of centaur’s hoofs over the hard turf.’84 Tom’s training in precision made him change ‘soft turf’ to ‘hard turf’ – at once consistent with those beating ‘hoofs’ and more surprising.85 Even as he imbibed philosophy and was warned off metaphor, he reconceived his learning, sometimes mischievously, to lasting poetic benefit.

  Rigorous study of Aristotle and regular ‘Informals’ – intimate tutorials – with Joachim and J. A. Smith required antidotes. The River Thames flows through Oxford and, as he had done at Harvard, so here Tom took up rowing. He was, he confessed to Aiken, increasingly fed up with ‘professors and their wives’. Tom sounded off: ‘As you know, I hate university towns and university people.’86 Typically, in an often pleasantly and honestly contradictory way, he sought to counterbalance one side of his experience with another. However much he was excited by London and complained of lack of ‘intellectual stimulus’ in Oxford, at Merton he excelled in argument; and when he went rowing with fellow students, American and English, he enjoyed that too. If he could be ratty about dons and donnishness, he could also describe himself in Oxford to Aiken as ‘contented and slothful, eating heartily, smoking, and rowing violently upon the river in a four oar’.87 He rowed in the position of stroke, and was pleased to boast in later life that he and his crew had beaten wartime Oxford’s only other passable four-oar. He was awarded a pewter mug.

  Offering a ‘Social Column of Births, Funerals, and Broken Hearts’, Eleanor Hinkley’s letters kept him abreast of life in Cambridge, Massachusetts.88 As he had done from boyhood onwards, Tom offset highbrow material with popular entertainment. So, when not reading Aristotle, he amused himself and Eleanor by ‘working’ (he used the word loosely) on outlining his ‘great ten-reel cinema drama, EFFIE THE WAIF’. Jokingly, he suggested which of their mutual friends, including Ann Van Ness, mig
ht act in this full-scale piece of ‘Amurrican culcher’, a mock-movie ‘drayma’ featuring, like his speech at the college debating society, Anglo-American contrasts. He assured Eleanor that this cinematic spoof whose characters included ‘SEEDY SAM, the blackmailer’ would be set partly in Medicine Hat among ‘the mountains of Wyoming’, partly in England at ‘the stately manor’ of ‘Gwendoline, Lady Chomleyumley’ and partly in imperial Kashmeer.89 Involving abduction, a man-eating tiger, a fakir and a German spy, Tom’s ten-reel extravaganza shows his taste for vaudeville now extended to silent cinema. Well informed, he developed this parody over several months in transatlantic letters. For Amy de Gozzaldi he created the part of Mexican dancer Paprika, ‘one of our best eye-rollers’.90

  Early in Oxford’s Lent term, Tom’s friend Culpin had fun in a 25 January debate. The motion deplored American attitudes towards British naval policy: ‘Mr Culpin attacked the American attitude with the greatest gusto, inspired to an unwarranted height by various specimens of the objectionable genus which he saw before him.’ John Bulmer joined in, ‘audacious enough to think America was not all hopeless; many of the people were reported to have reached real respectability; only their government was a tragedy’. Culpin was handed a bouquet for his efforts; the motion was carried convincingly.91 If light-heartedness energised the college, there was also grim uncertainty. Tom stared across soggy Christ Church Meadow, hearing news of commissions and casualties. Winter brought endless rain. Several Merton students were being called up to fight. London was experiencing Zeppelin raids. Self-evidently, Tom was a resident alien, a young non-combatant foreigner.